Exploring Innovations in Teaching and Learning at Everett Community College

Panopto’s long tail

Published July 17, 2017 by
John Melson

Last week I posted briefly about exploring some simple data showing how many EvCC courses use Canvas. This time around I’m turning my attention to Panopto, our video content management platform. Extracting useful information out of Panopto is a bit harder, so I figured I’d start with something simple: the total number of video hours viewed by (anonymized) course.

Let’s take a look:

This chart shows the 158 EvCC courses in which at least one video was viewed during the 2017 spring quarter, ordered (from left to right on the x axis) by the total number of hours viewed. (Note: you can hover over the line to view details.) As you might expect, cumulative viewing patterns across courses exhibit a clear long tail: a small number of courses account for most of the total hours viewed, but many more courses have at least some viewing at a low level. The course numbers provided here simply correspond to each course’s viewership ranking, not any externally identifiable attribute.

Total hours viewed is not likely to be the most revealing of measures when it comes to understanding how students engage with video materials in their classes, so next time I have a chance to poke at Panopto data I’ll look for more information that might be more illuminating. As always, I’m open to suggestions and ideas. What would you like to know about how we, as an institution, are using videos hosted in Panopto?